Bank Achieves 100% Growth in Credit Card Applications While Cutting Ad Spend by 35%

The problem

The client wanted to increase the number of applications for secured credit cards, but the initial application volume and quality were too low, and the cost per acquisition was too high.

The solution

To create a customer journey campaign through high, medium, and low intent Search campaigns; driving prospecting audiences to educational blog posts; and using remarketing on both Search and non-Search channels to re-engage users.

For the low-intent and non-Search prospecting campaigns, we set up a soft conversion for the max conversions bidding strategy. Knowing that we were unlikely to drive completed applications from an educational blog post on the Display network, we set the campaign goal to “view application page.” This event required the user to take two additional steps from the landing page. Doing so provided Google’s automated bidding signals to show our ads to users most likely to get to that third step.

During early keyword optimizations, we ascertained that there was a knowledge gap between users searching for a “secured credit card” versus a “credit building credit card.” In the first example, users are indicating through their search terms that they know what a secured credit card is and that it’s the right product for them. In the latter, they know there is an existing product that can help them build their credit, but they don’t have all the information yet.

Therefore, we divided Search campaigns by keyword intent into high, medium, and low segments. High-intent keywords were action-oriented: “apply for a secured credit.” Medium intent keywords focused on “credit builder cards” and “credit building credit cards.” In both these campaigns, users were sent to the first step in the application process, and the campaign goal was set to optimize toward application completions. The low-intent segment targeted info-seeking keywords, like “how do i build credit.” These users were sent to one of two educational blog posts (A/B test results for the blog pages were inconclusive as they performed similarly), with page views set as the primary conversion.

From here, we created remarketing campaigns on Display and Demand Gen. Segmenting audiences based on different points in the users’ journey allowed us to retarget users based on where they are in the marketing funnel and serve them customized messaging.

Why it matters

When we initially launched a credit builder campaign, the Client found that the application quality was low and the cost per acquisition was higher than the average deposit used to fund a new account. We found that users did not understand what a secured credit card is or how it requires a linked checking account. We needed to think of a way to educate users in the credit-building process so they understood that this is a specific type of credit card that helps users establish or rebuild credit by requiring a security deposit.